What we think

There’s lots being said about mindfulness in the workplace: there’s good evidence that personal mindfulness meditation practice reduces stress and improves wellbeing. There’s a clear instant appeal for leaders as it’s an obvious truism that resilience improves a leader’s effectiveness. But we think a significant opportunity is often missed regarding mindfulness at a group, rather than just an individual level. Those who’ve engaged in mindfulness practice find that the REAL ...

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Designing organisations to deliver their purpose and strategy is one of the trickiest challenges that managers face. Why? Because typically we’re encouraged to take a ‘technical’ approach to an ‘adaptive’ problem. Let me explain… On the one hand there is a rational linear sequence to organisation design – start with your purpose and strategy, determine your business model, and from that your operating model and organisational structure should flow. We use this sequence ...

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“How can we be more innovative?” is a question many clients ask us. It's not one that’s simple to answer, not least because it addresses so many more questions than “how do we have new ideas?” (questions around such topics as decision-making, risk appetite, performance management, interpersonal dynamics, organisational brand/identity, culture and many more besides). Even at the level of idea generation, “being more innovative” is tough when it is already explicitly or tacitly ...

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By way of a blog, we’d like to introduce to you a new Talik Strategic Partner: Mark Leonard. Mark’s into bringing together social process, somatic awareness and the cognitive principles of mindfulness meditation to organisational culture. We’re excited to have him on board Find out more about him and his background here Check out Mark’s fascinating take on the role mindfulness could ...

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How is sustainability framed in organisations? How do alternative framings enable or inhibit action on sustainability challenges? It seems the research we carried out five years ago at Ashridge is as relevant, if not more so, today. The questions we pose still fresh. Of the 24 organisations we spoke to, from Unilever and M&S, to Natural England and Sainsbury, the majority are ...

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Three quarters of an hour into a coaching session today, my “coachee” – in the midst of some deep, appreciative, soul-searching – suddenly lifted his head and laughed, “I thought this was supposed to be Presentation coaching!” You’re right. I responded. It is. I think clients are often surprised at the way I ask them to think, or to question themselves. What does their new hobby or their favourite subject at school have to do with “being a better presenter”? It’s ...

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It’s remarkable how often you’ll hear people say “We need to communicate better” or “It’s a communication issue” as if saying that alone will fix the multitudinous ills that plague them. Of course it’s a communication issue, the sad truth is, it’s ALWAYS a communication issue. Somehow, somewhere, someone isn’t communicating clearly and the butterfly effect amplifies that tiny wingbeat into the full-scale hurricane descending on some hapless soul elsewhere! Ok, I’m ...

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WEF thinks business is having a ‘morality moment’. They come around every so often, generally triggered by the public pronouncement of some less than savoury action by a multi-national company. The ensuing ...

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With the value of Bitcoin riding high (or maybe not by the time you read this) I figure I might ponder upon cryptocurrencies: those digital currencies such as Bitcoin that operate independently of a central bank, putting them beyond restriction and confiscation. Rather than get in to the techie stuff, though, I figure to ponder upon cryptocurrency in a wider context. Indeed, "pondering in a wider context” is something I spend much of my professional life helping clients do, especially ...

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Welcome to what we’ve learned to expect to be “the most wonderful time of the year”. From what I can tell from myself, clients, colleagues, family and friends, however, wonderful is more of an aspiration than a reality. The reality is more like a frenzied attempt to ‘get everything done’, much of which involves the acquisition of more ‘stuff’. Surely it could be more wonderful than that…. I’m minded of how one of my coaching clients recently reviewed our work ...

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